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In Archaic Modernism, Daniel Humphrey offers the first book-length,
English-language examination of three adaptations of Greek tragedy
produced by the gay and Marxist Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo
Pasolini: Oedipus Rex (1967), Medea (1969), and Notes Towards an
African Orestes (1970/1973). Considering Pasolini's own theories of
a "Cinema of Poetry" alongside Jacques Derrida's concept of
ecriture, as well as more recent scholarship by queer theory
scholars advocating for an antirelational and antisocial
subjectivity, Humphrey maintains that Pasolini's Greek tragedy
films exemplify a paradoxical sense of "archaic modernism" that is
at the very heart of the filmmaker's project. More daringly, he
contends that they ultimately reveal the queer roots of Western
civilization's formative texts. Archaic Modernism is comprised of
three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on Oedipus Rex, assessing both
the filmic language employed and the deeply queer mythological
source material that haunts the tragedy even as it remains largely
at a subtextual yet palpable level. Chapter 2 extends and deepens
the concept of queer fate and queer negativity in a scene-by-scene
analysis of Medea. Chapter 3 looks at the most obscure of
Pasolini's feature length films, Notes Towards an African Orestes,
a film long misunderstood as an unwitting failure, but which could
perhaps best be understood as a deliberate, sacrificial act on the
filmmaker's part. Considering the film as the third in an informal,
maybe unconscious, trilogy, Humphrey concludes his monograph by
arguing that this "trilogy of myth" can best be understood as a
deconstruction, gradually more and more severe, of three of the
most important origin tales of Western civilization. Archaic
Modernism makes the case that these three films are as essential as
those Pasolini films more often studied in the Anglophone world:
Mamma Roma, The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema, The Trilogy
of Life, and Salo, and that they are of continuing, perhaps even
increasing, value today. This book is of specific interest to
scholars, students, and researchers of film and queer studies.
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